Part 8

The only resemblance, as I had said, was about the mouth; for the beautifully cut lips of the statue turned downward at the corners, and the curve of Miss Read's sweet baby-like mouth was the same. But that was all. Above was the woman's face in marble, beautiful, sad, full of the knowledge and the grief of life; below was the face of a young girl, lovely, fresh, and bright, and knowing no more of sorrow than a blush-rose upon its stem.

"Exact!" said Lloyd.

Miss Read laughed, rose, and resumed her straw hat; presently they went away.

"There was not the slightest resemblance," I said, almost with indignation.

"People see resemblances differently," answered Margaret. Then, after a pause, she added, "She is, at least, much more like the statue than I am."

"Not in the spirit, dear," I said, much touched; for I saw that as she spoke the rare tears had filled her eyes. But they did not fall; Margaret had a great deal of self-control; perhaps too much.

Then there was a silence. "Shall we go now, aunt?" she said, after a time. And we never spoke of the subject again.

"Look, look, Margaret! the palms of Bordighera!" I said, as our train rushed past. It was our last of Mentone.

CAIRO IN 1890

I

"The way to Egypt is long and vexatious"--so Homer sings; and so also have sung other persons more modern. A chopping sea prevails off Crete, and whether one leaves Europe at Naples, Brindisi, or Athens, one's steamer soon reaches that beautiful island, and consumes in passing it an amount of time which is an ever-fresh surprise. Crete, with its long coast-line and soaring mountain-tops, appears to fill all that part of the sea. However, as the island is the half-way point between Europe and Africa, one can at least feel, after finally leaving it behind, that the Egyptian coast is not far distant. This coast is as indolent as that of Crete is aggressive; it does not raise its head. You are there before you see it or know it; and then, if you like, in something over three hours more you can be in Cairo.

The Cairo street of the last Paris Exhibition, familiar to many Americans, was a clever imitation. But imitations of the Orient are melancholy; you cannot transplant the sky and the light.

The real Cairo has been sacrificed to the Nile. Comparatively few among travellers in the East see the place under the best conditions; for upon their arrival they are preoccupied with the magical river voyage which beckons them southward, with the dahabeeyah or the steamer which is to carry them; and upon their return from that wonderful journey they are planning for the more difficult expedition to the Holy Land. It is safe to say that to many Americans Cairo is only a confused memory of donkeys and dragomans, mosquitoes and dervishes, and mosques, mosques, mosques! This hard season probably must be gone through by all. The wise are those who stay on after it is over, or who return; for the true impression of a place does not come when the mind is overcrowded and confused; it does not come when the body is wearied; for the descent of the vision, serenity of soul is necessary--one might even call it idleness. It is during those days when one does nothing that the reality steals noiselessly into one's comprehension, to remain there forever.

But is Cairo worth this? is asked. That depends upon the temperament. If one must have in his nature somewhere a trace of the poet to love Venice, so one must be at heart something of a painter to love Cairo. Her colors are so softly rich, the Saracenic part of her architecture is so fantastically beautiful, the figures in her streets are so picturesque, that one who has an eye for such effects seems to himself to be living in a gallery of paintings without frames, which stretch off in vistas, melting into each other as they go. If, therefore, one loves color, if pictures are precious to him, are important, let him go to Cairo; he will find pleasure awaiting him. Flaubert said that one could imagine the pyramids, and perhaps the Sphinx, without an actual sight of them, but that what one could not in the least imagine was the expression on the face of an Oriental barber as he sits cross-legged before his door. That is Cairo exactly. You must see her with the actual eyes, and you must see her without haste. She does not reveal herself to the Cook tourist nor even to Gaze's, nor to the man who is hurrying off to Athens on a fixed day which nothing can alter.

THE NEW QUARTER

(One must begin with this, and have it over.) Cairo has a population of four hundred thousand souls. The new part of the town, called Ismailia, has been persistently abused by almost all writers, who describe it as dusty, as shadeless, as dreary, as glaring, as hideous, as blankly and broadly empty, as adorned with half-built houses which are falling into ruin--one has read all this before arriving. But what does one find in the year of grace 1890? Streets shaded by innumerable trees; streets broad indeed, but which, instead of being dusty, are wet (and over-wet) with the constant watering; well-kept, bright-faced houses, many of them having beautiful gardens, which in January are glowing with giant poinsettas, crimson hibiscus, and purple bougainvillea--flowers which give place to richer blooms, to an almost over-luxuriance of color and perfumes, as the early spring comes on. If the streets were paved, it would be like the outlying quarters of Paris, for most of the houses are French as regards their architecture. Shadeless? It is nothing but shade. And the principal drives, too, beyond the town--the Ghezireh road, the Choubra and Gizeh roads, and the long avenue which leads to the pyramids--are deeply embowered, the great arms of the trees which border them meeting and interlacing overhead. Consider the stony streets of Italian cities (which no one abuses), and then talk of "shadeless Cairo"!

THE CLIMATE

If one wishes to spend a part of each day in the house, engaged in reading, writing, or resting; if the comfortable feeling produced by a brightly burning little fire in the cool of the evening is necessary to him for his health or his pleasure--then he should not attempt to spend the entire winter in the city of the Khedive. The mean temperature there during the cold season--that is, six weeks in January and February--is said to be 58 deg. Fahrenheit. But this is in the open air; in the houses the temperature is not more than 54 deg. or 52 deg., and often in the evening lower. The absence of fires makes all the difficulty; for out-of-doors the air may be and often is charming; but upon coming in from the bright sunshine the atmosphere of one's sitting-room and bedroom seems chilly and prison-like. There are, generally speaking, no chimneys in Cairo, even in the modern quarter. Each of the hotels has one or two open grates, but only one or two. Southern countries, however, are banded together--so it seems to the shivering Northerner--to keep up the delusion that they have no cold weather; as they have it not, why provide for it? In Italy in the winter the Italians spread rugs over their floors, hang tapestries upon their walls, pile cushions everywhere, and carpet their sofas with long-haired skins; this they call warmth. But a fireless room, with the thermometer on its walls standing at 35 deg., is not warm, no matter how many cushions you may put into it; and one hates to believe, too, that necessary accompaniments of health are roughened faces and frost-bitten noses, and the extreme ugliness of hands swollen and red. "Perhaps if one could have in Cairo an open hearth and three sticks, it would, with all the other pleasures which one finds here, be too much--would reach wickedness!" was a remark we heard last winter. A still more forcible exclamation issued from the lips of a pilgrim from New York one evening in January. Looking round her sitting-room upon the roses gathered that day in the open air, upon the fly-brushes and fans and Oriental decorations, this misguided person moaned, in an almost tearful voice: "Oh, for a blizzard and a _fire_!" The reasonable traveller, of course, ought to remember that with a climate which has seven months of debilitating heat, and three and a half additional months of summer weather, the attention of the natives is not strongly turned towards devices for warmth. This consideration, however, does not make the fireless rooms agreeable during the few weeks that remain.

Another surprise is the rain. "In our time it rained in Egypt," writes Strabo, as though chronicling a miracle. Either the climate has changed, or Strabo was not a disciple of the realistic school, for in the January of this truthful record the rain descended in such a deluge in Cairo that the water came above the knees of the horses, and a ferry-boat was established for two days in one of the principal streets. Later the rain descended a second time with almost equal violence, and showers were by no means infrequent. (It may be mentioned in parenthesis that there was heavy rain at Luxor, four hundred and fifty miles south of Cairo, on the 19th of February.) One does not object to these rains; they are in themselves agreeable; one wishes simply to note the impudence of the widely diffused statement that Egypt is a rainless land. So far nothing has been said against the winter climate of Cairo; objection has been made merely to the fireless condition of the houses--a fault which can be remedied. But now a real enemy must be mentioned--namely, the kamsin. This is a hot wind from the south, which parches the skin and takes the life out of one; it fills the air with a thick grayness, which you cannot call mist, because it is perfectly dry, and through which the sun goes on steadily shining, with a light so weird that one can think of nothing but the feelings of the last man, or the opening of the sixth seal. The regular kamsin season does not begin before May; the occasional days of it that bring suffering to travellers occur in February, March, and April. But what are five or six days of kamsin amid four winter months whose average temperature is 58 deg. Fahrenheit? It is human nature to detect faults in climates which have been greatly praised, just as one counts every freckle on a fair face that is celebrated for its beauty. Give Cairo a few hearth fires, and its winter climate will seem delightful; although not so perfect as that of Florida, in our country, because in Florida there are no January mosquitoes.

MOSQUES

It must be remembered that Cairo is Arabian. "The Nile is Egypt," says a proverb. The Nile is mythical, Pharaonic, Ptolemaic; but Cairo owes its existence solely to the Arabian conquerors of the country, who built a fortress and palace here in A.D. 969.

Very Arabian is still the call to prayer which is chanted by the muezzins from the minarets of the mosques several times during the day. We were passing through a crowded quarter near the Mooski one afternoon in January, when there was wafted across the consciousness a faint, sweet sound. It was far away, and one heard it half impatiently at first, unwilling to lift one's attention even for an instant from the motley scenes nearer at hand. But at length, teased into it by the very sweetness, we raised our eyes, and then it was seen that it came from a half-ruined minaret far above us. Round the narrow outer gallery of this slender tower a man in dark robes was pacing slowly, his arms outstretched, his face upturned to heaven. Not once did he look below as he continued his aerial round, his voice giving forth the chant which we had heard--"Allah akbar; Allah akbar; la Allah ill' Allah. Heyya alas-salah!" (God is great; God is great; there is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet. Come to prayer.) Again, another day, in the old Touloun quarter, we heard the sound, but it was much nearer. It came from a window but little above our heads, the small mosque within the quadrangle having no minaret. This time I could note the muezzin himself. As he could not see the sky from where he stood, his eyes were closed. I have never beheld a more concentrated expression of devotion than his quiet face expressed; he might have been miles away from the throng below, instead of three feet, as his voice gave forth the same strange, sweet chant. The muezzins are often selected from the ranks of the blind, as the duties of the office are within their powers; but this singer at the low window had closed his eyes voluntarily. The last time I saw the muezzin was towards the end of the season, when the spring was far advanced. Cairo gayety was at its height, the streets were crowded with Europeans returning from the races, the new quarter was as modern as Paris. But there are minarets even in the new quarter, or near it; and on one of the highest of these turrets, outlined against the glow of the sunset, I saw the slowly pacing figure, with its arms outstretched over the city--"Allah akbar; Allah akbar; come, come to prayer."

There are over four hundred mosques in Cairo, and many of them are in a dilapidated condition. Some of these were erected by private means to perpetuate the name and good deeds of the founder and his family; then, in the course of time, owing to the extinction or to the poverty of the descendants, the endowment fund has been absorbed or turned into another channel, and the ensuing neglect has ended in ruin. When a pious Muslim of to-day wishes to perform a good work, he builds a new mosque. It would never occur to him to repair the old one near at hand, which commemorates the generosity of another man. It must be remembered that a mosque has no established congregation, whose duty it is to take care of it. A mosque, in fact, to Muslims has not an exclusively religious character. It is a place prepared for prayer, with the fountain which is necessary for the preceding ablutions required by Mohammed, and the niche towards Mecca which indicates the position which the suppliant must take; but it is also a place for meditation and repose. The poorest and most ragged Muslim has the right to enter whenever he pleases; he can say his prayers, or he can simply rest; he can quench his thirst; he can eat the food which he has brought with him; if he is tired, he can sleep. In mosques not often visited by travellers I have seen men engaged in mending their clothes, and others cooking food with a portable furnace. In the church-yard of Charlton Kings, England, there is a tombstone of the last century with an inscription which concludes as follows: "And his dieing request to his Sons and Daughters was, Never forsake the Charitys until the Poor had got their Rites." In the Cairo mosques the poor have their rites--both with the _gh_ and without. The sacred character of a mosque is, in truth, only made conspicuous when unbelievers wish to enter. Then the big shuffling slippers are brought out to cover the shoes of the Christian infidels, so that they may not touch and defile the mattings reserved for the faithful.

After long neglect, something is being done at last to arrest the ruin of the more ancient of these temples. A commission has been appointed by the present government whose duty is the preservation of the monuments of Arabian art; occasionally, therefore, in a mosque one finds scaffolding in place and a general dismantlement. One can only hope for the best--in much the same spirit in which one hopes when one sees the beautiful old front of St. Mark's, Venice, gradually encroached upon by the new raw timbers. But in Cairo, at least, the work of repairing goes on very slowly; three hundred mosques, probably, out of the four hundred still remain untouched, and many of these are adorned with a delicate beauty which is unrivalled. I know no quest so enchanting as a search through the winding lanes of the old quarters for these gems of Saracenic taste, which no guide-book has as yet chronicled, no dragoman discovered. The street is so narrow that your donkey fills almost all the space; passers-by are obliged to flatten themselves against the walls in response to the Oriental adjurations of your donkey-boy behind: "Take heed, O maid!" "Your foot, O chief!" Presently you see a minaret--there is always a minaret somewhere; but it is not always easy to find the mosque to which it belongs, hidden, perhaps, as it is, behind other buildings in the crowded labyrinth. At length you observe a door with a dab or two of the well-known Saracenic honeycomb-work above it; instantly you dismount, climb the steps, and look in. You are almost sure to find treasures, either fragments of the pearly Cairo mosaic, or a wonderful ceiling, or gilded Kufic (old Arabian text) inscriptions and arabesques, or remains of the ancient colored glass which changes its tint hour by hour. Best of all, sometimes you find a space open to the sky, with a fountain in the centre, the whole surrounded by arcades of marble columns adorned with hanging lamps (or, rather, with the bronze chains which once carried the lamps), and with suspended ostrich eggs--the emblems of good-luck. One day, when my donkey was making his way through a dilapidated region, I came upon a mosque so small that it seemed hardly more than a base for its exquisite minaret, which towered to an unusual height above it. Of course I dismounted. The little mosque was open; but as it was never visited by strangers, it possessed no slippers, and without coverings of some kind it was impossible that unsanctified shoes, such as mine, should touch its matted floor; the bent, ancient guardian glared at me fiercely for the mere suggestion. One sees sometimes (even in 1890) in the eyes of old men sitting in the mosques the original spirit of Islam shining still. Once their religion commanded the sword; they would like to grasp it again, if they could. It was suggested that the matting might, for a backsheesh, be rolled up and put away, as the place was small. But the stern old keeper remained inflexible. Then the offer was made that so many piasters--ten (that is, fifty cents)--would be given to the blind. Now the blind are sacred in Cairo; this offer, therefore, was successful; all the matting was carefully rolled and stacked in a corner, the three or four Muslims present withdrew to the door, and the unbeliever was allowed to enter. She found herself in a temple of color which was incredibly rich. The floor was of delicate marble, and every inch of the walls was covered with a mosaic of porphyry and jasper, adorned with gilded inscriptions and bands of Kufic text; the tall pulpit, made of mahogany-colored wood, was carved from top to bottom in intricate designs, and ornamented with odd little plaques of fretted bronze; the sacred niche was lined with alabaster, turquoise, and gleaming mother-of-pearl; the only light came through the thick glass of the small windows far above, in downward-falling rays of crimson, violet, and gold. The old mosaic-work of the Cairo mosques is composed of small plates of marble and of mother-of-pearl arranged in geometrical designs; the delicacy of the minute cubes employed, and the intricacy of the patterns, are marvellous; the color is faint, unless turquoise has been added; but the glitter of the mother-of-pearl gives the whole an appearance like that of jewelry. Upon our departure five blind men were found drawn up in a line at the door. It would not have been difficult to collect fifty.

Another day, as my donkey was taking me under a stone arch, I saw on one side a flight of steps which seemed to say "Come!" At the top of the steps I found a picture. It was a mosque of the early pattern, with a large square court open to the sky. In the centre of this court was a well, under a marble dome, and here grew half a dozen palm-trees. Across the far end extended the sanctuary, which was approached through arcades of massive pillars painted in dark red bands. The pulpit was so old that it had lost its beauty; but the entire back wall of this Mecca side was covered with beautiful tiles of the old Cairo tints (turquoise-blue and dark blue), in designs of foliage, with here and there an entire tree. This splendid wall was in itself worth a journey. A few single tiles had been inserted at random in the great red columns, reminding one of the majolica plates which tease the eyes of those who care for such things--set impossibly high as they are--in the campaniles of old Italian churches along the Pisan coast.

It may be asked, What is the shape of a mosque--its exterior? What is it like? You are more sure about this shape before you reach the Khedive's city than you are when you have arrived there; and after you have visited three or four mosques each day for a week, the clearness of your original idea, such as it was, has vanished forever. The mosques of Cairo are so embedded in other structures, so surrounded and pushed and elbowed by them, that you can see but little of their external form; sometimes a facade painted in stripes is visible, but often a doorway is all. One must except the mosque of Sultan Hassan (which, to some of us, is dangerously like Aristides the Just). This mosque stands by itself, so that you can, if you please, walk round it. The chief interest of the walk (for the exterior, save for the deep porch, which can hardly be called exterior, is not beautiful) lies in the thought that as the walls were constructed of stones brought from the pyramids, perhaps among them, with faces turned inward, there may be blocks of that lost outer coating of the giant tombs--a coating which was covered with hieroglyphics. Now that hieroglyphics can be read, we may some day learn the true history of these monuments by pulling down a dozen of the Cairo mosques. But unless the commission bestirs itself, that task will not be needed for the edifice of Sultan Hassan; it is coming down, piece by piece, unaided. The mosques of Cairo are not beautiful as a Greek temple or an early English cathedral is beautiful; the charm of Saracenic architecture lies more in decoration than in the management of massive forms. The genius of the Arabian builders manifested itself in ornament, in rich effects of color; they had endless caprices, endless fancies, and expressed them all--as well they might, for all were beautiful. The same free spirit carved the grotesques of the old churches of France and Germany. But the Arabians had no love for grotesques; they displayed their liberty in lovely fantasies. Their one boldness as architects was the minaret.

It is probably the most graceful tower that has ever been devised. In Cairo the rich fretwork of its decorations and the soft yellow hue of the stone of which it is constructed add to this beauty. Invariably slender, it decreases in size as it springs towards heaven, carrying lightly with it two or three external galleries, which are supported by stalactites, and ending in a miniature cupola and crescent. These stalactites (variously named, also, pendentives, recessed clusters, and honey-combed work) may be called the distinctive feature of Saracenic architecture. They were used originally as ornaments to mask the transition from a square court to the dome. But they soon took flight from that one service, and now they fill Arabian corners and angles and support Arabian curves so universally that for many of us the mere outline of one scribbled on paper brings up the whole pageant of the crescent-topped domes and towers of the East.